A lightweight protocol for RFID authentication

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has many applications such as supply chain management, asset tracking, healthcare and logistics. Since RFID tags and readers communicate through a wireless medium, they are prone to a wide range of attacks. There are a number of measures to safeguard the security of RFID device operations and communications: mutual authentication, confidentiality, indistinguishability, forward security, and desynchronisation resilience. Due to limited computational power and memory, heavy-weight encryption functions cannot be performed in the RFID tags to execute the security protocols. Therefore, RFID security protocols are restricted to light-weight encryption functions such as simple one-way hash function, cyclic redundancy check (CRC), pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) and exclusive-OR (XOR). This paper develops a lightweight secure authentication protocol to mutually authenticate the RFID tag and the reader through an insecure radio communication channel. The protocol assumes that each RFID tag pre-shares a secret key with the reader. The protocol uses two random values to guarantee the freshness of the messages in order to outwit any replay attack. An analysis of the protocol using Scyther verification tool shows that the protocol ensures secure communication between the reader and the RFID tag provided the communication channel between the back-end server and the reader is protected.